Foreign troop numbers in Iraq fell by a quarter during 2018, AFP reported Tuesday (January 15th).
"In January 2018 there had been almost 11,000 foreign fighters, about 70% of them are American, the others are from other countries," Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi said Tuesday.
"In December, the numbers have been reduced to almost 8,000, and the American troops are around 6,000," he said.
Abdel Mahdi said more than 12 months after the government declared victory over the "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria" (ISIS) in Iraq, the drawdown was accelerating.
"In recent months, the decrease has sped up and in the last two months there was a drop of 1,000 forces," he said.
ISIS is now confined to a shrinking enclave in eastern Syria not far from the Iraqi border, where the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have been engaged in a major offensive with international coalition support since May last year.
